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GIMP: How to Automate the Tedium?

Okay, so here's one for you great GIMP overlords of cool:

Say I've got a transparent background tab with some blobs of color on it, and I want to take the smudge tool and randomly smudge these blobs of color inward (toward the center of the blobs) and outward, to give the color blobs a radial-like pattern that blends into the background layer.

Now, let's say I have a lot of these blobs of color, and it's going to take a long time to apply this "radial smudge" to all of them. How, oh great ones, would you automate this to make it easier on yourselves? (I tried using using alpha-to-select then stroke selection with the smudge tool selected, but this basically treated the smudge tool as if it was the painbrush tool, laying down whatever color I'd selected in whatever brush shape I'd selected instead of smudging anything.

Any thoughts would be duly appreciated, in the form of a nice soft wack from my +1 blackjack of repping...

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Pimping my worldmap here. Still WIP... long way to go, but I'm pretty proud of what I've done so far...

I have a python script (a modification of someone else's)that might do some of what you want...

Do you have python installed?

-Rob A>

I do indeed... and it appears to be working. (The posts I've been putting up on GURM and the problems I've had there seem to relate to the modifications that needed to be made to the .py and .ini files, but Python itself seems to work fine.)

Originally Posted by torstan

I'm sorry to suggest the obvious, but Gaussian blur doesn't do the trick? I guess that you are after something a little spikier?

Say I've got a transparent background tab with some blobs of color on it, and I want to take the smudge tool and randomly smudge these blobs of color inward (toward the center of the blobs) and outward, to give the color blobs a radial-like pattern that blends into the background layer.

Now, let's say I have a lot of these blobs of color, and it's going to take a long time to apply this "radial smudge" to all of them. How, oh great ones, would you automate this to make it easier on yourselves? (I tried using using alpha-to-select then stroke selection with the smudge tool selected, but this basically treated the smudge tool as if it was the painbrush tool, laying down whatever color I'd selected in whatever brush shape I'd selected instead of smudging anything.

Any thoughts would be duly appreciated, in the form of a nice soft wack from my +1 blackjack of repping...

How solid do you want the "spurs"???? Perhaps distort against a plasma layer (perhaps motion blurred in a specific direction). Alternatly, perhaps whirl and pinch might be what you need.

and do a selection to alpha then alpha to path, running the script will do this:

Enlarging and shrinking the selection first (to make an outside path and an inside path), then running the script first on the outside then on the inside I got something like this (after playing with spacing and such):

Of course, randomness lengths could be added in. Unfortunately, pdb calls won't use new settings like jitter ;(

Let me know and I'll upload a copy if this is the effect you are looking for.

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and do a selection to alpha then alpha to path, running the script will do this:

Hmmmm.... with some playing with the right colors and some dodge/burn effects, this would make for a somewhat quick way to make top down(symbolic) mountains effect. With variable lengths, I expect you could make some niceish hills...